Anchor Man

If you were a Torontonian with a TV in the 1980s, you knew J.D. Roberts, the heavy metal–loving, mullet-sporting, cool-guy music nerd who rose to local fame first as the co-host of The NewMusic with Jeanne Beker and then as a MuchMusic VJ. Before he hit 30, he’d swapped out interviews with debauched rockers for hard reporting, eventually relocating to the US to anchor the news on CBS and then act as the network’s chief White House correspondent. Roberts won Emmys and acclaim for his coverage at CBS and later at CNN, where he worked for five years. (He stores the awards in a box in his basement—“I’m not really into ‘I love me’ displays,” he says.)

Roberts’s move to Fox News in 2011 surprised many fans, but he refers to the opportunity to work for America’s most watched news network (Fox has nearly double the viewers of MSNBC and CNN combined) as a chance to “play for the New York Yankees.” He is now the co-anchor, alongside Sandra Smith, of Fox’s massively popular weekday news show, America Reports, where his dual citizenship positions him at the centre of the US-Canada conversation in a unique way. Here, he talks about the things people get wrong about Donald Trump, his impressions of Doug Ford and his most cherished Canadian commodity.

Thank you for agreeing to this bilateral meeting at such a fraught time between the US and Canada. Well, I still have my Canadian passport. I have to get it renewed next year. I met a fellow from the Canadian embassy at a pre-inauguration party, and he agreed to help me through the process. It can be onerous for Canadians living outside the country. It pains me to see what’s happening to the relationship between Canada and the United States, because it’s always been tight. So many Canadians have come down to the US and achieved success in the news business, in entertainment, in music and in other industries. Related: Trump’s Loss, Toronto’s Gain—Meet the artists, professors, scientists and other luminaries ditching the US and moving north

Between the tariffs and the talk of annexation, the relationship is arguably the worst it’s been since 1812. As a Canadian living stateside, do you feel pulled in two directions? The fact that that was the last major dust-up speaks to the healthy relationship we’ve had for the 200-plus years since. The friction does concern me, but I think in the end friendship will override everything. Canada is emerging from a moment of political transition, and once that shakes out, I’m hopeful the relationship will be solid again. But am I torn? No. The only two directions I’m pulled between are my two kids.Roberts has been married to Kyra Phillips, an ABC News anchor, since 2010, and they have 14-year-old twins. I’ve lived in America for three and a half decades, and I will likely live here for the rest of my days. I like to go back to Canada to visit family, but this is my home now.

Where do you stay when you’re visiting? We typically stay downtown with my sister, Linda, and her husband. Or we’ll go to their weekend place in Creemore. I grew up in Mississauga—although it was still Toronto then. Later, I had a place at Dundas and Sherbourne, and then a house on Palmerston.

Does the Trump administration’s virulent anti-Canadian agenda surprise you? I don’t think President Trump had a tremendous amount of respect for Justin Trudeau. I remember being at the White House when Trudeau came to visit, and there wasn’t much warmth there.In 2017, Trudeau visited the Trump White House for the first time—a trip that involved meetings about the economy and immigration, plus a viral handshake shoulder grip moment that launched a thousand think pieces. I think a lot of what Trump has been aiming at Canada was really more aimed at Trudeau. But you never know. Sometimes Trump’s best friends are the ones who have criticized him the most. He is very good friends with Ted Cruz, and they were taking knives to each other during the 2016 campaign. Marco Rubio traded barbs with Trump, and now he’s secretary of state.

You mentioned travelling back and forth between Canada and the US. Being able to cross borders has become more complicated lately. We’ve had a serious problem in the US over the last four years: 10 million people came across the border illegally,Politifact, a non-partisan, Pulitzer Prize–winning non-profit dedicated to fact-­checking political claims, labelled this Republican talking point as false. A 2023 report from the Pew Research Centre estimated that the unauthorized immigrant population in the US reached 10.5 million in 2021, a figure that includes people who lived in the US for decades before Joe Biden became president. and a large number of them are still here. President Trump is trying to get rid of TDA gang members.On March 15, Trump’s administration invoked a wartime authority, the Alien Enemies Act, to deport hundreds of immigrants to a prison in El Salvador, claiming they were part of a criminal gang called Tren de Aragua. When a Supreme Court justice issued orders blocking further deportations, Trump called for his impeachment. I recently interviewed the deputy director of the DEA, and he told me how dangerous these people are and how they’re establishing drug trafficking routes to Mexico, to Colombia. If they’re allowed to gain a foothold in the US, there will be trouble. At the moment, President Trump is focused on trying to control illegal immigration into the States. But, once that gets under control, I think the flow of travel back and forth across the northern border will remain as it has been for the last few decades.

And until then, what does Canada do? It’s not like there have been a lot of drugs crossing from Canada into the US.In January, Trump claimed that a “massive” amount of fentanyl was coming into the US from Canada. According to US Customs and Border Protection, 0.2 per cent of fentanyl border seizures in 2024 came from Canada. Most of it is coming across the southern border, but the northern border has been a problem too. The Swanton SectorThe Swanton Sector describes 475 kilometres of the Canada–US border between New York, Vermont and New Hampshire on one side and Ontario and Quebec on the other. In 2024, the US reported an uptick of more than 15,000 migrant encounters along that stretch. has seen a lot of illegal crossings and drugs coming in. The president is focused on the borders with Canada and Mexico as well as on the drugs that are coming up on the Pacific via the Caribbean from Colombia and Mexico. Right now, the drug cartels are using all the tools at their disposal—the demand hasn’t gone down.

What do you see as Trump’s endgame with respect to Canada? Does he really imagine a 51st state? That was just President Trump punking Canada and tweaking Trudeau’s nose. There is no chance that Canada is going to become the 51st state. He’s well aware of that. Plus, the land mass is so huge that you’d have to have 10 or more states. What Trump really wants to see is a fair trade relationship with Canada. He was the one who negotiated the USMCA,The Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement replaced NAFTA in 2019, following tense negotiations between the Trump administration and Canada’s then–deputy PM Chrystia Freeland. so a lot of his critics are saying that if Donald Trump doesn’t like the trade relationship with Canada, he should go back to that. One of the things he doesn’t like is the really high tariffs on dairy and other farm goods. I know that they only kick in after a quota is met, but the US has never gotten close to that quota. He thinks a rising tide floats all boats, and if there’s fair and free trade between Canada, the United States and Mexico, that’s going to help everybody.

The markets don’t like uncertainty. Even right-leaning media outlets like the Wall Street Journal have warned of a “Trump Recession.” This doesn’t seem like a rising tide. The markets go up and down as the breeze blows. And Trump has gotten a lot of companies to commit to opening new manufacturing plants here in the US, including east Asian companies like Taiwan Semiconductor,Motivated by Trump’s tariff threats, the Taiwanese microchip company made a $100-million promise to move manufacturing to the US by 2030. which has said it’s going to invest in the US to avoid tariffs. Tariffs are a lever that Trump uses to level the playing field and to bring jobs back into the US. That’s not a short-term process. With respect to Canada, the temperature has gone down, and maybe it will stay that way. That’s the thing with the Trump administration: if you don’t like the way things are, wait 10 minutes, because it’ll change—like the weather in Toronto.

What was it like to be Fox News’s chief White House correspondent during Trump’s first term? It was one of the high points of my career. We were drinking from a fire hose each and every day while at the same time breaking news and travelling the world. As a journalist, that’s a bucket list item.

How has the president changed since then? He has a much better idea of what he wants to do and how to do it. I think he has an opportunity to be more successful in a non-consecutive second term than he would have been in a consecutive second term. If you look back to 2020, he was besieged on all sides—by the Covid pandemic, by the fallout of an administration that saw firings every other day,Trump’s first administration saw a record number of high-profile resignations and firings, including those of White House chief adviser Steve Bannon (above), surgeon general Vivek Murthy, attorney general Jeff Sessions and FBI director James Comey. by lawsuits. He’s had a chance, over the last four years, to get an idea of who he can trust, who he wants close to him. And I think that a large part of the country is still reeling from four years of the Biden administrationWhile Trump has blamed the Biden administration for inflation, economists say that spending under both Trump and Biden during the pandemic played a role in price spikes. and inflation and unchecked illegal immigration. Trump has a much bigger mandate to enact the dramatic changes he wants to see than he would if he’d won in November of 2020.

Let’s talk about those lawsuits. Last year, Trump was convicted of 34 felonies relating to the hush money he paid Stormy Daniels. A House special council found that he had criminally engaged in attempts to overthrow the 2020 election result. He was found liable for sexual assault. Do any of these things make him unsuitable for office? More than 70 million people said they don’t. The American people have spoken—he’s the president.

You’ve had quite a bit of face time with Trump over the years. What are people getting wrong about him? They don’t understand his sense of humour. They think everything he says is dead serious when a lot of it is him just being funny. When he says, “Yeah, I’ll be a dictator for a day,” people think, Oh my god, he’s going to be a dictator. He’s just joking. He’s saying, I’m going to sign a bunch of executive orders on day one for things I want to get done, and then I’m going to get on with the business of running the country.

Was it a joke when he implied, during the 2024 debate, that Haitian Americans were eating pets?In a face-off with Kamala Harris about illegal immigration, Trump suggested that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating local cats and dogs—a baseless assertion that was refuted by local officials. No, I don’t think that was a joke. There were some people who were suggesting that this was happening, and he took it as fact, when it looks like it wasn’t.

Any anecdotes you can share from your time with Trump? He told me some stories about Margaret Trudeau at Studio 54.In the late 1970s, Canada’s de facto First Lady was a regular at the New York nightclub, where she hung out with Andy Warhol. Trump was also a habitué—although, according to Studio 54 co-founder Ian Schrager, he never danced.

That is some piping hot Canadian tea. Can you spill? I’m sworn to secrecy.

You famously took White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany to task over the president’s failure to denounce white supremacy in a 2020 debate between Trump and Biden. What led to that? There was the debate, where the moderator asked Trump if he was willing to condemn white supremacists and militia groups. Trump then said to the Proud Boys,The Proud Boys, a neo-fascist militant organization, publicly celebrated Trump’s remark. Many liberal voices characterized it as support for white supremacy, and several of the president’s colleagues urged him to clarify. “Stand back and stand by.” Everybody was like, What does that mean? And there were a lot of Republicans in Congress, particularly in the Senate, who saw that moment as a missed opportunity by the president to address what people had lingering concerns about. So the next day at the briefing, I asked Kayleigh McEnany to once and for all clarify his position. She said that, yes, he does denounce it.

In the moment, you seemed dissatisfied with McEnany’s response. It was an uncomfortable moment. I don’t know that I was satisfied, but it’s not my job to be satisfied. You ask the question, you get the best answer you can and you move on. From everything I know about Trump, white supremacy is not something he believes in.

I think the concern is that he courts people who espouse those views by using coded comments like the one he made to the Proud Boys. I think his comments were confusing, and a lot of his colleagues in Congress wanted clarity. I took a lot of blowback for that exchange on Twitter.

From who? From people—mostly Trump ­supporters—who thought I shouldn’t be asking that question.In an interview on Fox News, Roberts sounded off: “For all of you on Twitter who are hammering me for asking the question—I don’t care. Because it’s a question that needs to be asked, and clearly the President’s Republican colleagues a mile away from here are looking for an answer too. So stop deflecting, stop blaming the media. I’m tired of it.”

Fast forward five years and Elon Musk is giving what certainly appeared to be a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration. Can we draw a straight line between that and what happened with the Proud Boys? My personal opinion is that it wasn’t a Nazi salute.White nationalists celebrated Musk’s gesture (the Proud Boys’ Ohio chapter posted a video with the caption “Hail Trump”). Vocal critics include the chancellor of Germany and Musk’s own daughter.

What was it? I think it was more along the lines of [thumps] “from my heart to you.” I don’t know why Elon Musk would engage in that—I don’t think he has any Nazi sympathies. Maybe there’s something I don’t know.On March 14, amid a growing wave of Holocaust denial, Musk retweeted a post denying Hitler’s responsibility for the the deaths of six million Jewish people.

You mentioned that your job is to ask uncomfortable questions. Is there one that sits particularly high on the awkward meter? I can’t remember the exact question now, but I once asked Bill Clinton about the Republican criticism of a policy he was pursuing, and he clearly didn’t like it. Clinton was like a thermometer: the red in his face would slowly rise, and depending on how far up it got, you would know how angry he was. A lot of my colleagues are combative—maybe it’s performative. I try to ask questions in a way that is probing and that people can’t escape from, because escaping questions is what politicians are trained to do. When I was the White House correspondent, I got to know Trump well enough that I asked him questions in such a way that he was going to bite. As a journalist, that’s the goal.

How am I doing so far? Are you biting? Well, I’ve answered your questions so far—although you didn’t probe me about Maggie Trudeau.

You recently interviewed Premier Doug Ford. What was your impression of him? I had met him once before, and I had met Rob Ford when he was mayor. Doug Ford is an interesting guy. He had a business in the US,Doug Ford spearheaded the expansion of his family’s label business into Chicago and New Jersey. The US branch of the company was sold in 2022. so he understands the American psyche. I haven’t followed his management of the province to the degree where I’d be able to offer a comprehensive assessment of where he is as premier. I do think he is cut from the same cloth as Trump—they both rise to the challenge of confrontation. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

In March, Secretary of Commerce ­Howard Lutnick said “Canada should say thank you” to the US amid trade tensions, the implication being that we are ungrateful. Agree or disagree? Well, that would be asking me for an opinion on the news, and it’s not my place to give that.

What do you make of the theory that Trump’s tariffs are revenge for the 2019 NATO meeting where Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron and Boris Johnson were caught laughing at him? I don’t think I’ve ever put those things together. I know that Europe didn’t like Trump pushing them around in terms of ponying up more money for NATO, and then they made fun of him. But one person who really did appreciate Trump’s push to get more money for NATO was then–secretary general Jens Stoltenberg, as well as the current secretary general of NATO, Mark Rutte. He made the rounds on Fox the other day, and he said that Trump is a great friend, a great ally. Rutte loves the fact that Trump is telling European nations and Canada—which, by the way, will now be living up to its GDP percentage commitment to NATOIn 2002, NATO set a two per cent of GDP target for its members to encourage countries other than the US to pay up. Last year, Canada committed to meeting the target by 2032/33.—to step up to the plate. So the leaders may scoff at him, but the guys running the show like him.

If you’re the prime minister of Canada for a day, are you choosing to up our NATO contribution? I don’t know enough about the finances of the nation to say what I would do about NATO, but if I were PM for one day, I would come down to the White House and sit with President Trump and say, “Let’s talk this thing out. Let’s come to an agreement on how things are going to go.” I would go in knowing that he loves a spirited negotiation. Trump is all about the art of the deal. If you come in ready to get steamrolled, Trump will steamroll you. But if you stand up to him and you stick to your guns and you’re polite about it and you’re willing to negotiate, then you’ll probably come out of that meeting with a good result. The perception would be that the PM of Canada went to the White House hat in hand, but I would make it clear that that was not the case. I’m not going to capitulate—I’m going to negotiate with one of the world’s great negotiators.

Let’s head back to the past. Before you left for the US in the 1990s, you were a Toronto MuchMusic VJ who spent time with the likes of Freddie Mercury and Cindy Lauper. Which early interviews have stuck with you? Meeting Freddie Mercury was one of the highlights of my life. That was at the Rock in Rio Festival in 1985 in Brazil. I really wanted to do an on-camera interview with him, but he said no cameras, that he was relaxing but was happy to talk. I got a photo of the two of us that I still carry around. When people ask me what I did before the news, I show them the picture of me and Freddie. And how’s this for full circle? A friend of mine, John Ondrasic from Five for Fighting, is playing the Birchmere in Virginia in May. He does a version of “Bohemian Rhapsody” in a sort of orchestral way, with violins and cellos, and he wants me to play guitar on it. I’m frantically learning the chords so I don’t fall flat on my face.

You posted a video of you rocking out to Def Leppard’s “Photograph.” How often do you get to jam? Not as often as I’d like. Most of my jamming is done in my basement with an audience of one: our golden retriever, Charlie.

MuchMusic was, in its way, a deeply patriotic promotion of Canadian art. That was very much on purpose. Back then, Canadian music—other than Gordon Lightfoot, Anne Murray and the Guess Who—was relegated to the back burner. The CRTC had regulations that 30 per cent of programming had to be Canadian, but the radio stations would dump all of the CanCon on weekend mornings, when listenership was at its lowest. We knew about all of these amazing Canadian bands, including Lover­boy, Bryan Adams, Lisa Dal Bello, Men Without Hats, Glass Tiger and Platinum Blonde. They had as much talent as musicians from anywhere else, so we took it upon ourselves to be their champions.

To an outsider, your trajectory from MuchMusic VJ to Fox News anchor may seem strange. Does it feel that way to you? When I was a kid, AM radio was the thing. I grew up on 1050 CHUM and Shotgun Tom Rivers and all these names nobody remembers now. That was my drug—AM radio. I loved listening to it, and I wanted to be a Top 40 DJ, but when I sent my resumé around, I kept getting job offers to read the news. So that’s what I did. I went up to Owen Sound and attended city council meetings and reported on the news. Eventually they let me have a country music show from 8 to 10 p.m. every night. That led me down the road to CHUM and The NewMusic with Jeanne Beker and then MuchMusic, but I always had that news background. By the ripe old age of 28, I had realized that music television was a young person’s game, so I went to Moses Znaimer,Today, Znaimer, the co-founder and former head of City TV, runs Zoomer, a media brand focused on Canada’s Boomer population. and he gave me CityPulse Tonight, and the rest is history. I went to CBS in Miami, came back home to host Canada AM on CTV, then I was off to CBS in New York, then to CNN and later to Fox.

Still, most rock VJs don’t end up on right-wing media channels. It started with a conversation with Roger Ailes.Ailes was a media consultant for presidential campaigns before becoming the founding president of Fox News. He died in 2017, leaving an indelible imprint on US media and politics, a legacy complicated by allegations of sexual harassment from more than 20 women and his subsequent firing from the network he started. I had met him back when I was at CBS and thought he was just a brilliant, brilliant guy. I was in the shower one morning in 1997 when the phone rang, and my then-wife answered it and told me it was Roger Ailes. When I picked up, he said, “John, you’re doing great stuff. I want you to come over and be one of my anchors.” I had literally just signed a three-year contract with CBS, but we kept in touch. By late 2010, I was looking for a change.

What appealed to you about Fox? The opportunity to really do some great reporting. There were very distinct lines between the news division at Fox and the opinion division at Fox, and I would be part of the news division. One of the reasons that Roger wanted to bring me over was because I was a guy who is straight down the middle. Another great thing about coming to Fox was that it was the number-one network. Who wouldn’t want to play for the New York Yankees?

I realize you are making a distinction between yourself and certain talking heads on your network. Do you ever hear one of them say something odious and think, That’s going to make it harder to argue that we’re in the credible news business? Not at all. If you watch MSNBC or CNN or you read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or the Washington Post, you’re going to read and hear a lot of things you disagree with. That’s part of the overall constellation of where news and information are at this point. I think a lot of what we’re seeing from straight news organizations in this country is tilting to the left. So for a news network to be centre-right isn’t out of that constellation. The model for us is very much like a newspaper, where you’ve got the front page in the news section and then you’ve got the opinion section. Evening programming at Fox is the opinion section. We are the front page.

If Robert Kennedy wants to come on your show and promote treating measles with vitamin A, would you welcome the interview? Definitely. I’m open to talking to anybody about anything. If I were close minded, I wouldn’t be much of a journalist. You go into interviews armed with information that may run counter to what that person is claiming, and you talk to them and ask what they believe and what that belief is based on.

Polling from the Kaiser Family FoundationThe KFF is an American think tank focused on the intersection of communications and health care. A 2021 study found that viewers of CNN, MSNBC, NPR and network news were significantly less likely to believe Covid-related misinformation compared with viewers of Fox News and NewsMax. found that Fox News viewers are more likely to believe conspiracy theories about vaccines, about January 6, about the Great Replacement... If you polled MSNBC viewers and asked about some things that they believe in, you’d probably get an equal number of things that you would find unusual.

But Fox viewers are getting these ideas from your network. They’re not getting them from me.

As we assess the lasting impact of the trade war, is there a made-in-Canada product you would miss the most? Aero bars.

They don’t have Aero in the States? No. Nor do they have Crunchie. My sister sends me a stash every once in a while.

The original publication of this story contained a couple of errors regarding Roberts’s employment history and housing details that have since been corrected. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.